My “day job” is that of a reporter at The Monroe Evening News, which is an employee-owned, independent, daily newspaper in Monroe, Mich.
So feel free to consider this tip as coming from a biased source.
But it’s also fact.
If you get only the Sunday edition of your local or regional newspaper, and newspaper circulation numbers across [...]

I can always tell when a link to Monroe on a Budget is posted on monroenews.com. Reason: I generally get about 100 page views a day from readers who linking through that site.
You don’t have to wait for my link button to show up on the feature list on monroenews.com. I do rotate off and [...]

From time to time, I’ll read or hear about someone who wants to save money and gets the newspaper “just for the coupons.”
That means they’re picking up a Sunday newspaper on single-copy sales during the weeks they have heard via word of mouth that there are good coupons in the newspaper inserts that week.
I know [...]

What’s been your favorite tip or link on Monroe on a Budget?
Feel free to chime in on the comment section below, chat with me on Twitter or send me an e-mail.

The page views on Monroe on a Budget have been bumping up in the past couple of weeks, with many of those referrals and links coming directly from local sites such as The Monroe Evening News home page.
If you are one of my new readers, hello!
The MEN has done a lot of marketing both on [...]

I’ve been approached by beggars, homeless people and panhandlers before. But yesterday I had two such encounters in Monroe, Mich., and it’s quite possible with the economic situation that others in southeast Michigan and northwest Ohio also are running into more of these scenarios.
Here is the appropriate response when you are approached by someone who [...]

This sign can be seen today in several doors and storefront windows of businesses in downtown Monroe, Mich.:

The sign reads:
Due to the economy, we’ve laid off gloom, doom and bad news. That means when you walk in here, you’ll only find people who are upbeat about our country, about business, about people, about life! So [...]

The Monroe on a Budget spring 2009 tour schedule included a Monroe Community Education class at Cantrick Learning Center on Wednesday night.
There were eight students. Em from Mom Moments, one of my Internet neighbors in the BlogsMonroe network, was among those in my class.
The grocery shopping presentation plus a bonus discussion on coupon organizing techniques [...]

A recurring complaint in today’s economic times comes from the working class and middle class families who find they “make too much money” for the assistance they have long come to expect as resources for financially struggling families.
Some of those question came up in the WTOL virtual town hall chat tonight.
I first ran into that [...]

My great-grandmother was a talented quilter. She grew up in a rural community where quilting was the cherished folk art and social hobby among the women; but even after she moved to another state, she kept up her interest in quilting.
When you look at a quilt, you notice that it consists of many pieces of [...]